Several books for the purpose of teaching young children to read have been published. They have taken on various formats. Most books reflect the consensus of educators that repetition of words is a very important aspect of the learning process. To be effective, the repetition should not be a monotonous drill, but should be presented in such a way as to maintain the child's interest at a high level and encourage accuracy of perception. Books generously illustrated with pictures of boldly colored distinct objects are more likely to retain a child's interest than unillustrated books. Books full of illustrations and replete with series of repetitious words would seem to be optimum; in fact, most books used for teaching reading skills to children are so formatted.
Another aspect to the teaching process for improving reading skills utilizes word/object associations. For example, a word is printed on or directly next to a visual representation of that word. Such an association may be repeated several times throughout a book. U.S. Pat. No. 3,496,653 contains a disclosure of this type of book.
A common drawback with prior books is that they are very limited in their use. A book may contain a series of stories where a small number of words are repeated several times. Such a book does provide a useful function, but has diminished usefulness once it has been read. Other available books based on the concept of word/object associations suffer from the same limited usefulness.
There is a need for a book which provides a varied method of teaching reading skills based on generally accepted methods. Such a book would not be monotonous to the child. Additionally, the book would be capable of being used in a variety of learning exercises. Such a variety would make the book interesting and challenging to the child while giving the teacher/parent a choice of options tailored to fit a particular child's learning needs and degree of advancement. Any book, of course, must be capable of mass production at a reasonable cost. In accord with the invention herein, a book has been developed which fulfills the objectives of teaching reading skills in a variety of ways.